‘White Lies Matter’ group threatens to turn stolen Confederate statue into toilet if demands not met

A mysterious organization is holding a stolen Confederate monument for ransom

This week, a group claiming responsibility for the theft of a Confederate monument in Selma, Alabama, sent out an email message to local media with their ransom terms.

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Last month, the Jefferson Davis Memorial Chair, which is worth a whopping $500K, was stolen from an Alabama cemetery.

According to The Washington Post, now the group White Lies Matter has reportedly taken responsibility for the theft but isn’t asking for money for its return. Instead of monetary compensation WLM reportedly said that it would only return the chair to the United Daughters of the Confederacy if the organization agreed to display a specific banner outside its Richmond, Va., headquarters.

The banner, which the group claims was already delivered to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, is said to feature a quote from Assata Shakur, the Black Liberation Army activist who has been wanted for years by the FBI for the 1973 murder of a New Jersey state trooper.

Shakur, born Joanne Chesimard, escaped prison in 1979 and has lived in Cuba ever since. She is still considered a fugitive and remains on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list.

“The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives,” the banner reads.

Adding to the symbolism of the request is the mandate that the banner be put up on Friday, April 9, which is the anniversary of the Confederacy’s surrender in the Civil War, and be kept up for a full 24 hours.

“Failure to do so will result in the monument, an ornate stone chair, immediately being turned into a toilet. See enclosed photograph,” the group said in the email to AL.com.

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“Like most Confederate monuments, [the chair] mostly exists to remind those whose freedom had to be purchased in blood, that there still exists a portion of our country that is more than willing to continue to spill blood to avoid paying that debt down,” it said.

“We took their toy, and we don’t feel guilty about it,” the group added. “They never play with it anyway. They just want it there to remind us what they’ve done, what they are still willing to do. But the south won’t rise again. Not as the Confederacy. Because that coalition left out a large portion of its population. All that’s left of that nightmare is an obscenely heavy chair that’s a throne for a ghost whose greatest accomplishment was treason.”

“Nobody knows what to make of this, it’s just really strange,” Dallas County District Attorney Michael W. Jackson told the Post. “But you get used to The Twilight Zone in Selma. Rod Serling would have a good time if he were down here himself.”

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Jackson, who is Black, also admits that initially – like many – he read the name too fast and thought the group was calling itself “White Lives Matter,” and it took a beat for him to realize it was actually using “a play on words” and calling itself White Lies Matter which has the complete opposite political connotation.

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